Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Sarah Palin, the once obscure governor from Alaska who is shaking up rightwing US politics, is promising to honour the woman she calls the Iron Lady by visiting Britain to see Margaret Thatcher.

Today Palin told her 1,630,386 Facebook fans that she was in discussions about meeting the baroness. In typically convoluted Palin language, she said she had received an invitation for a visit to London that "included the offer of arranging a meeting" with Thatcher.

The post came a day after the Mail on Sunday reported that Palin herself had made the approach, with her people contacting Thatcher's office to ask for an audience. The Mail said Thatcher had agreed to see her, though no date has been specified.

I can see what Palin gets out of it, she gets to rub shoulders with a right wing legend, but Thatcher gets nothing out of associating herself with this non-serious person.

The very fact that Palin is a quitter would appear to go against every fibre of Thatcher's being.

But they share a love of tax cutting and hostility towards organised labour, and Palin in her Facebook message called Thatcher "one of my political heroines" and role models. She said the elder woman had created a blueprint for "overcoming the odds and challenges of the status quo".

She also highlighted Thatcher's close friendship with Ronald Reagan, whose mantle Palin has sought to inherit in her ongoing bid to win over rightwing Republican support perhaps for a putative run on the White House in 2012 and certainly for lavish financial gain.

Palin, by rubbing shoulders with people like Thatcher, is hoping to imply that she is from similar stock, but she's not. Even those of who loathed Thatcher recognised that she was a force to be reckoned with, that this was a woman who knew what she wanted to do and was not going to allow anyone to stand in her way.

Palin is simply not in the same league. Thatcher had politics in her blood, Palin is simply in this for the money.

Quite why Thatcher is even entertaining a meeting with her is simply beyond me. But then she is very old now.

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That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.